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tv   News and Public Affairs  CSPAN  September 10, 2012 2:00am-6:00am EDT

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how do you answer that question? we talked about the possibility of the 21st century usa. we looked at the possibility that the department of defense could take the lead. we looked at the idea that the state department could take the lead. we looked at the national security council and that a non-governmental organization might take the lead and we found a case to be made for each one of those options. in the end, we recommend an nsc in the lead model backed by a 501c3 capable of conducting research, commissioning research, mobilizing intellectual and not so intellectual resources.
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if i had more time, i would go through the considerations that led us down this path and perhaps we can talk in greater detail about the reasons that led us to be skeptical of big usia, to reject a leadership role for dod, raise questions about the capacity of the state department to take the lead, etc. let me spend a couple of minutes on the recommendations that we did make. we talked about putting the national security council in the lead. a deputy assistant to the president for national security providing over and empowered interagency committee, the counter terrorist committee and
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to ensure appropriate executive branch authority, we believe this new configuration should be created through legislation. there will be an order but it is supplementary. it is not the primary source of the authority of this new entity. we go into detail about a decision making process with in this committee and above this committee. we also talk about a new center for counter-terrorism research and we concluded that a 501c3 organization that could receive public and nonpublic funds would be the most appropriate and it has a number of different roles, including conducting research, mobilizing a network of experts, establishing
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locations, making grants to foreign nationals and organizations who are involved along the lines the doug talked about. involving the private sector and rendering advice to the u.s. government but not taking orders from it. this would be an independent entity. the third component of our recommendation is a strong presidential, executive order which would underscore the support of the chief executive. it would spell out the authority of the new deputy assistant for national security to take the lead, including working with the omb to come up with the ideology budget. it would also send a message to
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other parts of the government, including those with diplomatic and military functions, that this is a center of direction of policy that they need to take seriously and to collaborate with. there would also have the lead in the preparation of a strategy report. we concluded this section with proposals for strengthening the state department, the department of defense, and the broadcasting board of governors and their capacity as participants in this process but not the leaders of it. thank you for your attention. >> thank you. i would like to call upon james glassman, a founding director
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for the george darby bush institute, the think tank at the george w. bush presidential library. he served as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs from 2008 to 2009. before that he was chairman of the board of governors which directs, among other things, the voice of america radio. he is the host of ideas and action with jim glassman, a weekly series on public policy issues on more than 100 public television stations around the united states. he has served as president as the atlantic monthly magazine, executive vice president of u.s. news and world report, and the co-editor of roll-call.
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we are delighted that he is here to comment on the subject. >> i want to begin by congratulating the doug and bill. this is an excellent study and i have to say i have read about three dozens of these and i even wrote one of them, which some people consider the best. this is an excellent report, for reasons i will go into. it urges america to show how to organize the government to do that. the current administration, not just the war of ideas as an activity, but the very phrase is now anathema, a sad development.
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this became evident to me when i started meeting with members of the foreign-policy team and was warned it would be unwise if i wanted to have any impact on their thinking to use the term "war of ideas." i am not sure which of the two is more offensive. my own authorization was clear. in the long run, winning the war on terror means winning the battle of ideas. it could not be clearer than that. around the same time, president bush assigned the undersecretary the lead in the efforts to counter a violent extremism. that meant conducting a war of
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ideas. we had some successes but time was short and there were obstacles and among those, the fact that at the state department, the default position is to make foreigners like us better. that is a problem which this report goes into a cogent way. the war of ideas, the task is not to fix a perception of the united states. america's images not at the center of the war of ideas. it is not about us. but that is a paradigm of difficult change. this is why the most important aspect of this paper is that it proceeds not from the question, how do we fix public diplomacy, which is what the other papers say, but from the question, how do we address the ideological
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threats to national security using the non-violent tools that are associated with public diplomacy? framing is almost everything and i think the authors have framed this issue just right. it has been my main complaints that we need to think of it as a set of tools directed at specific objectives. that is what this paper does. my main goal was to marginalize and weakened islamist extremist groups. not to bring a lot of exchange students here, although that is a nice thing to do. that is where we spend most of our money. to weekend is honest extremist groups, which the strategy of 2006 clearly identifies, the principal enemy is a transnational movement of extremist organizations and individuals and their state and
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on state supporters that exploit islam and use terrorism for ideological ends. the current administration identifies al qaeda as the enemy. we understood the enemy is a movement motivated by an ideology. it advocates for a committee residing at the nsc. this is a tough one. this problem. i think it presents a big problem. in the bush administration, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy was given the lead with the emphasis on countering violent extremism. i headed an agency and my vice
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chair was an official who looked over my shoulder to make sure i was doing the right stuff. i worked closely with the nsc. it was the nsc that encouraged the intelligence community to participate in this group in a serious way. if you know them, that is not going to happen. the big advantage was i had an actual budget and i can execute things. we were operational. we could do things. we could demonstrate and say here is the way you build a network. the nsc has not been able to do that. i understand the concerns about the state department but i have to say an undersecretary with the support of a president, and we have that, and the secretary, is going to get support at the state department.
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that is the truth. there is no easy answer but my preference is state although it is a close call. i want to comment on other things, what is the broadcasting board of governors, which i used to chair. that is the name for the u.s. government's nonmilitary broadcasting which communicates more than 60 languages and puts an emphasis on areas like afghanistan, iran, arab nations, china, vietnam and so forth. much criticism has been leveled at it in recent years and i think a lot of it is uninformed. it actually does a good job given its constraints. the problem is that it is a mess. as this study says, it needs a ceo. every organization needs a ceo.
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its ceo is all of the governors. the chair has more power but not much. it needs somebody to actually run it on a day to day basis. it suffers from a conflict. it is a journalistic organization protected by a fire wall by the state department. as the losses, it is a tool of american foreign policy. it is hard to be both. it is not easy to resolve the conflict but it is foolish for the largest effort of the u.s. government, with a budget as big as that of the state department's to be outside the coordination of national security policy. that is an issue raised by this report and it is a very intelligent one. in contrast to some of the other criticisms.
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finally this. broaden the target. it should be directed not to just at islamist extremism, there are other targets of opportunity. i think it is the number one target but there are other ones. cuba, russia, north korea, china, the study mentioned europe. we got far down the road on a plan to initiate a nonprofit organization based in europe that would promulgate liberal ideas and push back against islam isn't. we call it problems of extremism after the publication during the cold war, problems of communism. europe is ground zero. it is where tribal hatred merges with radical tradition.
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this study notes that the challenge of the potential weakening of existing liberal societies with large muslim populations are at risks of being influenced. extremist and threatens the core of european liberalism. the war of ideas is critical to the success of europe and the arab spring, whether there are attacks on our shore or not, now was the time for the counter offensive. president bush says freedom is universal. everybody wants it and deserves it. it makes americans safer and accomplishes an important moral purposes, it makes people freer. that may be unpopular in some circles but it has never been more important. thank you.
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>> i am very pleased to now call will marshall to the lectern. he is the president and founder of the progressive policy institute, established in 1989 as a center for political innovation in washington, d.c. he has one of the chief intellectual architects to modernize politics. he is the co-editor of many books. i will mention two. "memos to the new president" and "with all our might," published in 2006. will is now on the board of
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directors along with bill galston of the national endowment of democracy. >> thanks to hudson for organizing this report. it is a rigorous and creative and goes on a series of other investigations over the last decade. i hope it will add some momentum to really do something about this. i do not have a dog in the fight as to what is the kind of scheme for this. so i will yield to those who have been inside and try to make it work. i have my own doubts about the white house as the center for
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this but that is speaking from ignorance. what i want to focus on, the fundamental question, why hasn't anything happened? why are we still talking about it? why don't we have a strategy for countering the ideology that motivates people to kill westerners? i want to offer a few thoughts on that and then a couple of ideas on what this idea campaign might actually focus on in a concrete way, assuming we actually did that. first, we have not done anything. during the cold war, we understood that as an ideological conflict. we understood the need to fight the communist creed. we knew that was fundamental to victory and that our strategy
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was to contain it and at last it, which is what we did. but we had the usia and many other organizations working to weaken the appeal of this ideology. it was a western ideology. it had tremendous appeal. but it did not seem like islamism does to be an alien creed that does not threaten us with the prospect of mass conversion. we are not willing to see that in the ad states. -- in the united states. obviously europe is different. because of the large muslim immigrant populations there. but there is much prospect of islam is some catching on in the united states.
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we think it is not terribly threatening and it is now a creek without a country, except iran, which is a different kind of islamism. the sunni grande has not found a home. it is not a nation state that threatens us. if we can kill the leaders through this capacity that this administration has developed, we can contain this virus until it dies off. i am not sure that is true. that seems to be one reason why we have not acted. another is, as speakers have mentioned, our unease with an ideology that has religious provenance. americans have a respect for religious conviction. not always true in europe these
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days. we do not want to pick fights with 1.5 million muslims across 150 countries in the world. the idea of a clash of civilizations -- there is no reason for us to subscribe to it. we look at this conflict as a debate between muslims about what it means to be a muslim. what is the proper interpretation or the political applications of the doctrines of islam and we feel we do not have much to contribute to that so we do not. we have not developed the capacities we are talking about today. what i consol the handful of fanatics. the enemy is just al qaeda. not really. i wish it were true. we have seen the spread of affiliate's after 9/11. osama bin laden that it was a strategy for survival.
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we have seen the ideology spread around the world in places like syenite. suddenly, a victory does not let us final and we see others taking up the banner. more than that, we have seen, thanks to the arabs spring, a wave of sunni extremism. it has been called spreading from the persian gulf to north africa across the middle east. we suddenly see these parties challenging and becoming fierce rivals of the brotherhood in egypt, for example. that is not the outcome many hoped is what we would see.
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but the biggest problem is that the narrative fines accord among the muslim mainstream. this is the hardest part to accept. it overlaps with a muslim identity. this is a sense of grievances against the west, the cultural clips, and europe is the leader, having overshadowed the once great unity of the islamic world and leadership of it, and there's a feeling out there that even if you are not ready to sign up for jihad, a certain sympathy with some of these groups. he argues the problem is not anti-americanism, it is the islam as ideology. i think it is both. when i look at accounts of why people get radicalized, even in
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the united states, often the motive is revenge. drone strikes or what looks to be a kind of unequal struggle between freedom fighters defending muslims against a technological superpower. there is a cultural patriotism in going off to war. it is not always a self- conscious identification that inspires people to join the terrorist cause. that is important because it means we need the research people are talking about. we need to draw distinctions between the varieties of islamic movements that we're confronting today. and to minimize the kind of anti-american blow back that is going to happen as we prosecute this campaign. we may also lack confidence in
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our own story. tony blair came to town and made the point that in the west, apologizing for its historical sins, when we try to get tough that we are evenhanded, we often end up looking weak and undercutting the moderates in the world, not reinforcing our case. the flip side is the feeling that muslims have not been ready for democracy, which is demonstrably false. the polling shows clearly that the muslims want greater personal freedom. they think democracy is the best form of government that they want is on to play a bigger role in political life. it is the tension there. it is the reconciling of political maternity that is going to be the trauma that unfolds for the next generation in the muslim world and the united states has to engage that
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at every level. four points about what these campaigns should encompass. it has to be strong if it is not contradicted by official policy. in the muslim world, there are doubts about america's commitment to democracy, the results of stable but friendly despots over the aspirations of the people they have been ruling and that has stuck with us. but now it behooves the united states to make a fundamental decision to throw our weight behind moderates in the islamic world, even though that will create short-term problems. we have to weigh short-term losses, the cost of such a shift in policy against the long-range strategic benefits of
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testing the change is in the muslim world bed will integrate muslim countries. let's not neglect economic opportunities. andl talk about democracy political freedom and the rule of law and power sharing and all these things are important but the arabs spring began by an act of self immolation against the lack of opportunity. i think that winning the ideas war is going to entail speaking to be suppressed economic aspirations of the people in the muslim world and making the case for an open market to meet their material aspirations better than the old model of the political distribution of economic rewards so it becomes stakeholders in the global economy.
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it would become less susceptible to radicalization. the report lays emphasis on an islamist. as a reaction to the west and modernity. the attacks on the united states are often tactical and the real enemy seems to be, the near enemy, seems to be the regimes in the eyes of al qaeda and other extremist groups. these enemies of god, all -- as al-qaeda defines them, are fair game. the victims of these are overwhelmingly muslims.
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nobody has documented this. we should not wait for the next conquest to tell us about this going on in the arab world. one of the most discouraging things i have read in the last decade was this quote from virginia muslims who recruited by the taliban were arrested in pakistan before they could do that. one of them said we're not terrorists, we are jihadists. we need to organize an
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international effort to buttress norms against the killing of civilians on any pretext. i would go for a fifth camp geneva convention. i think we need to codify the new rules of war and define terrorism as crimes against humanity by way of taking some of the revolutionary glamour out of the jihad and putting faces on the victim's and creating a legal basis of the people who recruit suicide bombers and plan the attacks. this does not require any sophisticated theological knowledge on the part of the united states. we would simply be showing solidarity for the victims. thanks.
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[applause] >> i would like to thank our two commentators for their interest in remarks. i want to pick up one point that will have mentioned -- the issue of anti-americanism is important but one of the key points to keep in mind is that there is this kind of understanding that the west is inevitably hostile so you get the claim that someone is acting in revenge against the u.s., for instance, that has to be understood in terms of an understanding of the u.s. where there is no possibility for not taking revenge because the u.s. has to be hostile.
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the clearest example of this was november of 1979 when a group of a fanatics took over the grand mosque in mecca. the u.s. embassy is burned and there is fires. khomeini made some comments that were broadcast that the u.s. was somehow responsible for this. what possibly would lead people to think that could be the explanation of an attack fanatics text if you assume the u.s. is hostile to islam in general, maybe you can conclude that it was the u.s. the fundamental fact, the assumption of inherent hostility -- in the case of the
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region's coming out of the hour but spring is we have to focus to the extent we can on the pragmatic issue of the future. whatever past animosity there is toward the u.s., we want them to think not in terms of how do i get back at the u. s? rather what use can i make of the u.s. to do the things i can do now like to make egypt a better place. >> i don't disagree that it would be helpful to counter anti-americanism. there are a lot of benefits of
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that and some of them may be that it would be -- it would take some of the steam out of the terrorist -- the appeal of the terrorist ideology. what i found when i was in the government, repeatedly trying to get other people in the government interested in a serious effort against islamic extremism, one of the things that was generally brought forward by people who were disinclined to do anything in this area was that they would argue the problem is basically anti-americanism which is to say, our own policies. there were people who made the argument and they took this trip from what al qaeda leaders
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have said is that if the united states get out of the middle east and did not base its forces there, al qaeda would not object to the united states. if the united states stops supporting israel that i love the problem would go away. the entire american as an argument is used as a way of saying let's not talk about them, let's talk about us and we are the problem and what can we -- what can we do differently? they are basically writing on the terrorism issue to promote an agenda they support. the other thing that came up as the root causes of terrorism argument. the two main root causes of
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terrorism that were put forward in my experience or the arab- israeli conflict. after the arab spring, it is harder to make. people made the argument that the hostility, the instability that we see in the arab and moslem world in general is all tied more or less to the arab- israeli conflict and if we can solve that, if lot of that problem would go away. the other is the problem of poverty. people asserted that the real root cause of terrorism was that people are poor and lack economic opportunity. there are large parts of the world that are extremely poor,
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even poorer than most of the arab world, for example. the people in those areas, as unhappy and politically disenfranchised as they are, do not turn into terrorists. you need something more to explain the terrorism phenomenon than simply poverty and lack of opportunity. it is were calling attention to these points because if we ever get to the point where we have a president who wants to do something in this area and launch an effort and the ideas that our report promotes work are taken seriously, i think it is inevitable that the opponents of these ideas will be reviving these arguments as a way of changing the subject.
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we will be happy to take questions from our audience. as i mentioned before, questions can be sent in via twitter @hudsoninstitute. wait until the microphone and it's brought to you and if you couldn't identify yourself and your affiliation, i would be grateful. why don't we start here in front? yes. ok - that's fine.
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>> i served in iraq recently and i would be curious as to whether the report gives attention to the work we have done in iraq. there were a number of projects that n.e.d. was involved in in iraq and the republican institute assisting the iraqis preparing for elections. i was working at the provincial reconstruction team level. we have voter education as one project. we instructed iraqi schoolchildren on the concept of human rights and the role of the elections in a democratic
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society for grades 1-12. we were doing work in this area. iraqis complained that some of our efforts in public health was not being sufficiently publicized to the iraqi public. >> we did not really deal too much with the situation in iraq. we were looking at it from a more global point of view. many of the things you're talking about are the kinds of projects that would come under this strategy now. iraq was a different situation. we were there at large numbers with large forces and could operate in a more direct way than we could generally
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speaking. >> also, i don't want in any way to deny the existence or belittle the importance of various efforts of different people around the u.s. government that are relevant to this subject. the point we were making is there is no comprehensive national strategy specifically to counter the ideology. it is certainly true that much of what our forces have been doing on the ground in afghanistan and iraq has helped to change attitudes and thinking. that is quite different from a national strategic ideas campaign of the type that is aimed to contradict the way of thinking that extremism is promoting.
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>> i am confused as to what the target is meant to be. the initial impression i had was that it was a broader conception of islamist ideology. then i got the sense that it was a narrow slice of terrorist islamist philosophy reflected in al-qaeda and bin laden. some would argue the ideological roots were as if in the communist era one were to
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look at the fringe groups engaged in terrorism activity. if you broaden it out, you run into the issue that if we're worried about ideologies that counter liberal democracy there is a range that should be of critical concern. how can you draw those boundaries? >> you hit on an issue we spent a lot of time discussing and try to get clear in our own minds. it is precisely because islamism is a very complex phenomenon. the notion that it is just
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terrorism is to narrow because you can have and the ideological belief system which does not call for violence now but nevertheless, inevitably leads toward it. on the other hand, we wanted to leave open the possibility that various groups such as the moslem brotherhood is becoming a power in egypt would not necessarily go in a kind of violent direction. in other words, it is a new situation and people react in situations in ways that are unpredictable. that is why i tried to focus on this notion of a belief in the inevitable hostility of the west toward islam. it struck me that that was -- to the extent that one could draw a line between what we're talking about and what we are not talking about and what we are aiming at, it seemed to me
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that that was the clearest indicator of what we are getting at. somebody takes the position that the west is so hostile to me that i have to be fighting it all the time because it denies my religion and is trying to destroy my religion, therefore i cannot possibly live with it, therefore whether i am fighting now may be a prudential issue. in principle, violence is always going to be possible and justifiable because this other guy is out to get me. to the extent that i could find a way of drawing the line, that's what i did. au're quite right, it is difficult area because it is a complex phenomenon. we're in the middle of change.
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>> mark has gone to the heart of the matter. we do spend a lot of time discussing and debating this very question among ourselves. to see precisely how we resolve this among ourselves, i recommend to you our report to give you a snapshot. here is the final paragraph of the introduction -- after islamists won popular elections in tunisia, secretary of state hillary clinton told an audience of young tahitian "there are those here in thune asia and elsewhere who question whether islamic politics can be compatible with democracy." tunisia has a chance to answer that question and to demonstrate that there is no contradiction.
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in our judgment, this kind of openness to democratic possibilities is a proper basis for american policy until the facts on the ground supplied a negative answer to secretary clinton's question. we have to be binocular. on the one hand, we have to look at the intellectual and ideological roots. on the other hand, we have to attend to the complexities of political reality and the differences that situations can make in the evolution of thought as it grapples with the responsibilities of governing the country. it is our view that is an open question whether the leadership in tunisia, the leadership in egypt, the leadership in turkey
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and elsewhere grappling with the complexities of government actual sightings as opposed to simply mounting opposition movements and vigorous rhetoric against the status quo will be driven to understand that there is something in between syad ktutb and french secularism on the other hand. there is a lot of ground between those two polar opposites. it would be foolish for americans to assume that the precise relationship between religion and state power which has served us well is possible or even a pro. and these specific circumstances on the ground in countries like tunisia and egypt. i will venture far afield from
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my home base and expertise to say that islam "to be a principal source told law for a new society. that is to make a statement that has enormous number of shades of meaning. should it be the details of block, the words of blog text should be the principles of bowl? should be the moral understanding behind block? certified islamists have made all those arguments and more besides and depending on which one it is, islamism may, in those circumstances or may not turn out to be compatible with democracy and pluralism. at any rate, we have to pay
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attention to the fact that democratic votes have brought these governments to power after an extent period in which these populations believe that we are not exactly encouraging a transition to democracy. we have no choice, in the first instance, but to respect the outcome and work with it as best we can. i think secretary of state clinton delineated the only basis of american policy. we should be open-minded and experimental and to what we can to encourage the positive evolution and out come to these processes but who knows? >> we received a question via twitter - "how to the panelists
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assess the efforts of the state department's center for strategic counter-terrorism communication?" i know that we have heard from a report from people in that office about activity. i don't know if you are -- it is a fairly new office in the state department. >> one of the things you see in washington is when you administrations come in, they come in with the attitude that the guys that came before them did not know what they were doing. we will never do that. after a while, they realize that maybe they were onto something. i don't remember what gsac stood for which is pretty much the same thing.
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by the bank is generally a good idea. >> i think it is a positive development. it is more narrowly focused than what we are talking about in the report. it is very much focused on al- qaeda and trying to present al qaeda now especially after the hour of the spring as passe and irrelevant. i think it is a positive development but it is rather narrowly focused is my impression from hearing ambassador lebaron talk about it. it is a positive step but it would require more broad based
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focus to become to the sorts of things we're talking about. >> i think this activity, the strategic counter-terrorism community -- vacation office, the activity is positive because it involves the development of tools that are useful for a strategic idea and campaign. practice makes purpose so it is good the u.s. government is doing things in this area. part of the problem i would say with all this is it is constrained by strategic guidance not to take on any real ideological issues. it is engaged in-political campaigning against the al- qaeda organization. making al-qaeda look bad,
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making al qaeda look irrelevant, but not arguing that what al- qaeda says about the duty of moslems is wrong. it does not go that far the administration does not want to engage in the fight against al qaeda on the ideological level. it has its reasons for that. they have been laid out at length by john brennan in a number of speeches. the fact that the office of existent is developing some tools that could be put to more useful purposes is a good thing. >> thank you for this discussion.
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what are the reasons behind the attempt to downplay the role of the ideology? is it lack of knowledge or is it because some people feel they don't know how to deal with the ideology in this field or is it political correctness or something else? >> i think this report does an excellent job in describing what that is about in one section. the gentleman who wrote it can exploit a better than i can. the issue of dealing with an ideology that is based on the distorted view of a religion is one issue.
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there is a real allergy to that in the u.s. government. people take the first amendment, prohibition of established religion in the united states and some sort of prohibition on the u.s. participating in matters involving religion abroad. the second point is this issue of squeamishness about u.s. government participation in the marketplace of ideas. they say it is not something we should do and we are corrupting the marketplace, we as a government. that is a circle that we try to square with something we call public diplomacy 2.0 which is a hackneyed phrase. forget that title. the idea was that our job was not to sit here like i am doing now and protect you.
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it does not work very well. people don't want to listen. thank you for listening to this. really was that our job was to convene a discussion in which our views would become part of the discussion. that, to me, is a completely valid participation in this marketplace of ideas. that may be tactics but if you really want to get into this war of ideas, that is probably a good way to do it rather than have the secretary of state make a pronouncement. >> the gentlemen in the back row. >> thanks very much for this discussion.
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the comment on the question that was conveyed. dan benjamin was the head of the office of state and before this report, islamism was not a friend or for discussion. my question is that we're in a new situation. which for america is two-fold. we have arab spring and the
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coming to power of islamic groups and there is nothing to do but to deal with those governments. we hope they develop in the direction, in a benign direction. the second point is that the united states is withdrawing from the region and we will not be doing very much there anyway. there won't much in the way of preventive policies.
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i think that policy has the support of the american public. given those two things, with the office of the report, how would they seek the objective under the circumstances? what difference would it make in the way in which we would approach the subject now that these two major changes are happening? >> let me begin to grapple with this. i don't know that it would have to much direct effect on the sort of programs we're talking about.
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a lot of our conversations of that training follow the way i thought about it as a grad student and as an economist before i worked with the administration. it was pretty simple u.s. as a training and if the workers who get the training your better
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off than the ones who didn't, then it is a good training. if they gain from it -- if the gains from the program do not exceed the costs, then it is not a good program. but there are a lot of stakeholders who are approaching the matter more than the actual workers getting the training. you have to pick on the politicians because they are the easiest ones to pick on good but they're often fighting over how much to spend on job training rather than the dollars provide better benefits than costs. as a result, what we often end up seeing is that the devaluations of training programs get used as a political weapon rather than -- political ammunition rather than guidance
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for job training. so you have some politicians worrying that the valuation will end up getting their program -- get their beloved program killed and the smaller pie available for training funds. and people are concerned that, if the data was not right, if the valuations were more populated and not straight forward, then the evaluations could be used in a properly appeared were a technocrat could take a deeper look and say how this program should be improved and how we can collect vetter data to get better understanding of it. the concern is that it will come under the line of political fire and it would be better to do nothing at all rather than to have poorly-gathered information.
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not only do studies become politicized, but they're very design answers the wrong question. how do the benefits exceed the total cost? there is the valuation that i read before i left the department of labour. it was a recent devaluation of assessment programs -- it was a recent evaluation of assessment programs. when i looked at the evaluation, i was extraordinarily disappointed because they looked to see whether or not the money spent reduced the amount of money paid out on unemployment insurance by a greater or lesser extent.
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it reduced the amount. they definitely pay for themselves. but there is something you have to know. one important aspect is that, if you get called to come in and be assessed and get a job assistance and you do not show up, then you deny get your unemployment insurance. what we could not tell us whether we were simply selecting some people out, which is probably less desirable way to cut spending because you are simply randomly making a barrier for some people that makes them not show up or successfully reducing fraud or payment errors, which would be a good thing, or whether it was actually helping people get jobs. the important thing about these mechanisms for cost-reduction is to truly evaluate the policy, but they were absent in the evaluation. this reflects the fact that some of these evaluations are designed to answer the question as a political question rather than perhaps evaluating the
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question from the perspective of the workers. there are other stakeholders. jeff mentioned these. this comes back to what paul was saying. these stakeholders are people like state governors and state agencies and even the grantee. i will share another conversation i had. i will the chair who this conversation was with, but one of the things i wanted to do was to encourage more training to be provided to the long-term unemployed. i was told that no grant he wants to provide services to those people because they will make their numbers look so bad. the fact that we have a system where people are trying to cherry pick the easiest to place workers were trying to find the workers who the data does not identify them as difficult to place is the problem with the way we collect data.
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jeff talked about how you can only get to states to participate in the wea program. this goes back to being afraid that it will look bad. it is not a great in-depth evaluation and it comes back to this concern that we might be better off knowing nothing at all rather than ending up with something that can be used against us in a way that would hurt our particular state. i think we really need to think about a solution to this. i will throw one out there could one idea would be to think about streamlining service delivery and training programs a lot more than we currently do and not tying total funding for training to the success of an individual training program or the failure of an individual training program. if we had money for training and
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we had people like paul who decided which training program should be expanded and which should be shrunk, that was not having any impact on the total amount that was being spent and we could have better programs that were more efficient and did not confuse these two particular issues. finally, one thing that has not, battle and we never hear this discussed and that philip we have to bring this up is the job training interacting with other programs. we overlook the fact that when we do not have an adequate pathway to get people into jobs, our disability insurance rolls do as well. when we do cost-benefit analysis, when we pretend that there is not other avenues to government support for people who don't get into jobs, we are ignoring a very important aspect of our government system and an important cost that we
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could be avoiding. all of the discussion expanding unemployment insurance, i find it very remiss that we do not have a discussion over whether it was giving people off the stability when we were keeping them on in temporary program like an insurance -- like unemployment insurance. the me turn to talking in little bit about the idea of unemployment insurance, employment services, and training and why i think they should be linked together. most recipients are not required to have employment assistance. perhaps more pull map -- more problematic than that is the ui payouts. we actually have employment funding for employment services
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per person that hit an all-time low recently. it may still be there. and has fallen in real terms by over 50% since the 1980's. when i hear let's apply private- sector principles to running our government programs, i think we have mistakenly taken that to mean let's have every one of our state agencies operating independently, calling themselves different names so nobody knows how to find employment services from one state to the next and employers cannot coordinate across ohio and iowa when it should mean that does a private-sector company that runs an employment trends do and -- that runs an employment programs. we need to tie those things together. the problem with the
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reemployment eligibility assessment is that there is very little connection between the ui office that is in most states and the employment services folks who would actually be able to connect these people with the types of psychological counseling or the types of programs and would help them to get back into were. not everyone needs all three parts of our employment support system. but to divorce them is to lose important and necessary connections. i think we should be thinking about trying to find ways to tie the systems together in a way that is easy to move across base. the reason i really wanted to come to ui is that there have been in number of proposals to reform it and some of it has recently passed and some of it hasn't summit was able to be done because we were outside of the stock -- some of it hasn't. some of it was able to be done because we were outside of the system.
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the states, despite the argument that the federal government funds all of these administrations, they have most of the control. the federal government does not even have the data. it does not like they're sitting on the data and not giving it away out of respect for the states. there's very little that the fed the government does that involves the hamstringing at the state level. you have a lot more flexibility with a federal program because it is not -- i am not sure if this is the right word to say, but it is not an entitlement or is not getting to the same way that the state program is. so some of the ideas that were floated about was something that was called in the president's
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jobs bill, whatever that was called, the american jobs something -- the american jobs that, it was called bridge to work, which was really modeled after a program that people on all sides of the aisle had supported, which allows workers the opportunity to keep their skills and training in the workplace for your occupation while continuing to receive unemployment insurance. what this really amounts to is letting employers try out workers that they are skeptical of. there are a lot of reasons why people don't to make the receipt of unemployment insurance conditional on something like that. but simply trying it out, letting it be evaluated, figuring out if it works. even though it was implemented in georgia, we have never really seen a bit -- a real evaluation of their program. the other programs that were proposed work wage insurance, which larry has already talked about, to create a path to
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rehire. increasing unemployment insurance to cover firms that reduced hours instead of workers and to cover people who want to pursue self employment or entrepreneurship as well. support for additional innovative state programs. while i think it would be great to have better coordination across the state, at the same time, it is useful for allowing states the flexibility to try different programs. i think we need to do more of that. in fact, that is something that has -- there is a small amount of money that was provided for that in the bill that was passed in 2012. so i have exceeded my time. so i will stop here. i will make one last comment on what i think is different in our new system because it has not been said in our current unemployment climate.
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there is a lot of people getting back into the labor market mark actually highly skilled. our system does not have any space to support them. and losing them is that for the economy. it is bad for them. it is just overall bad and we have to find a way to have a system that will be able to help those folks as well. >> thank you, betsy. jim. >> one of the advantages of going last is that i get to build on what everyone has said already. i will highlight a few of the things that i had in my notes that i want to reemphasize print one of the things that is important to recognize is that we are at the point right now where we have an enormous supply of long-term unemployed workers, workers who have seen a significant degradation in their skills given that they have been out of the labor market for so long.
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and we have seen a big increase in the productivity of workers who remain in the market. this will be one of the great and long-lasting legacies of the recent financial crisis and subsequent recession. i think it is imperative to figure out how we will provide them with the skills necessary to get them back in the labor market. in addition, there is a call particularly in the house of representatives that we need to simply kill all of our job training programs because they are not particularly effective. given the supply of long-term workers in this call to kill those programs is something i do not agree with. i find it surprising that we have had so little public debate about what we need to do with the system to see if we can get it and make it more
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effective. i want to focus on a couple of things. one of the is the lack of coherence structure -- lack of coherent structure in our jobs program. i think the lack of rigorous evaluation of those programs -- i will also say the lack -- from a practitioners standpoint -- useful evaluations of the progress. evaluations are focused on the average impact of the treated, which is a program for measuring cost-benefit analysis, but not necessarily a program for telling, ok, we know it is not working. what parts are working and had we improve it? for both historical and turf reasons, training programs currently operate through various state agencies. it is important to recognize that the employment security program and the unemployment insurance program, which was
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part of the great depression, the management of this program is divided equally between the states and the federal government. at the time, it was for constitutional reasons. they did not realize that the commerce clause of the constitution was not very relevant. that is why this so difficult to get states to cooperate with the federal governnt. there was a gao study that found that come in fiscal year 2009, nine federal agencies spend $18 billion to administer 40 different training programs. almost all federal employment training programs, including those with broader missions, such as multi-purpose block grants, overlap with at least one other program and provided similar services to similar populations. so there is simply a lot of services provided and oftentimes not provided in a very coherent fashion, at least from my
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standpoint. i should make clear that there are a lot of people who have worked actively in the department of labour. i am not one of them. so i defer to the appeared to have a lot more information about the structure of these programs. from the standpoint of looking out, it does not seem like we have a very coherent program. the employment, security and -- program provide more extensive long-term employment training programs. and often were the workers go to get the training programs is like an accident. who they talked to first, who had money in a bucket, as opposed to a comprehensive assessment of where they could receive the most benefits given the situation that they are in. we are supposed to and some
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sense fix these programs where workers can go and deal with the appropriate agency. but the structure of these one- stops are still very siloam a white -- very siloaed. and not all the focus on providing job search assistance for workers who have received training in other programs. there is a difficult -- there is a disconnect. it is difficult for workers to flow between providing these different services. some states are better than others prove the gao points to texas and florida. all the employees, including the ef workers respond to the web director.
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they operate in the more efficiently. the basic problem is that, when you are spending a lot of money on administration, you're not spending a lot of money on training and that is a problem. as has been pointed out, most long-term train goes on a committee colleges, for profit and public, unless the director of a local web and the head of the committee cuts are fairly enlightened. they operate separately, in a vacuum. and that is a problem. often, the community colleges have a disconnect between the college and the job training agencies about what skills they think the workers would need and often a disconnect between the community colleges and local employers. and we need to bring everybody into the conversation. we need to structure the system in a way that would allow that. i am not blaming anyone. i want to make clear that i do
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not blame anyone for the with the system has evolved. there are a lot of historical reasons. but it is imperative that we make redesigning the system a focus moving forward so we can fix some of these problems. blet's take all the training dollars -- and i do mean all of them -- let's bring them all together in a single entity and when the weekend do is provide block grants to states that would allow states to be treated in these programs. even better, let's get the state's out of the way and give it directly to the webs.
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with straight -- with stiff riverside to conduct ongoing rigorous evaluations -- with stiff and rigorous ongoing evaluations to determine what our inappropriate evaluation methods are. the continue those efforts to push that on to the states, pushed the dollar is down and ensure that those dollars are spent in a way that continue to be affected. alternatively, you want to keep it at the federal level. i am analysts found that idea, but that is fine. let's combine all the training programs so they are more seamless and we can move through them and someone is actually answerable to the results of the training program. let me talk a little bit about the valuation and the lack thereof. it has been mentioned previously, as far as i know, the only rigorous evaluation
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that has been completed today is the one that i worked on with carolyn and peter. we get 12 states to a gray -- to agree. i cannot release the results on a state-by-state basis. i think probably it agrees with the ones were most competent at handling the data, but i don't know that for certain. there is only one rigorous taa which wasa back in 1995. a variety of other programs we have heard about with rigorous evaluation of job corps. there have been some, but we're not doing them on a regular basis. we heard about the ongoing experimentally values and and i think that is important. but it is important to recognize, too, that they are very expensive and it takes a long time to complete them. and they do an outstanding job
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of answering the questions that they are trying to address. but it is often hard to push them in little harder and answer ancillary and supplemental questions. i think the research suggests that non-experimental rigorous evaluation, when done appropriately, can supplement the experimental evaluations and answer questions that have been raised in the last experimentally valuation which would then feed into the next experimental evaluation and it should be complimenting each other. much of the evaluation done so far does not often answer it question i would be useful for a practitioner. i can tell you that, for dislocated workers, it seems that the training does not provided pantages that exceed -- that are beneficial. we don't see wage increases or employment outcomes that are enormous for dislocated workers. i can tell you why. and i cannot tell you whether a
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difference amongst characteristics that we care about. do we see bigger benefits based on who is providing the training? do benefits differ between for- profit vocational colleges and public community colleges? i don't know the answer to that either. presumably, those are things we should know about. the data don't support it. it is probably not surprising because no one has ever -- known since particularly interested, at least at the federal level or the programs, to answer them. aboutt agree know much the distribution of fax or the margin of facts. what is the impact of the last person in the door. knowing the average treatment effect tells us what happens if we kill the entire program aired but that is often not what we're thinking about doing.
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and we have talked about what is known as general equilibrium of bucks. are we shifting the chairs around? there has been a little bit of work in that, some done in france, some in canada, not much of it done here. one thing that we would like to know is how those the polar bear and the effects vary among the business cycle. as an example, i looked at community colleges with the return of the plaza and certificates and agrees that the college level. looking at dislocated workers, the benefit they received from going to community colleges. there has never been a study looking at federally-funded workers to attend community college and what benefits they get from it. one would think that that would be an important question to ask. with wibs, one of the things i
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have seen is that they are hiring consultants to justify their existence because of the poor performance measures that they are using. so they are measuring the return on investment for the economic impact of providing job training in an area. basically, how much additional employment do they get for spending taxpayer dollars. nor do they provide an at current -- an accurate assessment of the programs. they spend somewhere between 1.5% and 1% of the overall evaluation christi provided that it is about one-tenth of 1% occurred programs should conduct periodic evaluations, but also should examine other important
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measures of program effectiveness. they should require researchers and practitioners to work together to work it -- to come up with useful evaluations. it would help the practitioner in designing programs. steve is asking me to wrapup pinned some of the efforts that we have seen, including dol's effort in having a clearing house like d.o.a., i think that would be valuable in a long way. unless we take seriously trying to design the work force system, what will eventually happen is that the republicans in the house will succeed and we won't have job training programs, at least federally-funded training programs, going forward. i think that would be a bad outcome. >> we have time for some questions. i would like to pose the first one to the panelists. one thing that strikes me is that there is a great deal we don't know from a narrow
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economic perspective about what works and what does not. we have heard different program evaluation results using various methodologies. there are issues on how to randomize and so on. but there is also set of issues, which came up from the very beginning of larry's remarks, about, suppose we knew what worked? how would restructure the existing system in such a way so that those who are operating a programs, making decisions about resource allocations had the proper incentives or how we would design the incentives in order to make best use of what we have learned? i want to see if i can hint at that and the bay suggesting that there are a couple of alternative consolidation strategies. i would not mind hearing from the other panelists about that part of the equation.
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>> i tried to mention is a little bit. i think it would be helpful to separate the issue of how much we will spend on training with which programs will fund and not find. we are in agreement that making it more centralized, more central, sort of a clearing house program, would be a way to do that. and making it -- having more of a technocrat or someone -- a procedure where we do evaluations and consistently change the programs are how we are adjusting it. there are some things that have to happen. assuming we know what works, something has to happen with the performance standards because that is so bad that it is really
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pie in the sky to say "assuming we know what works." if you solve that problem, i think a lot of the incentives that various stakeholders, like the state agencies and the grantees and all the people running these programs have, will become less problematic. they will say, oh, you can look clearly adder programs. let me just give you a concrete example of why this performance standard is causing some problems. the department of labor has lots of money for everything we were doing. but the problem was that we recollecting very good data. one of the more highly politicized things that came out of the stimulus was a green jobs funding and everyone is paying a lot of attention to whether
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there is bring jobs training that was working. i took a look at that data and it looks like it was the worst thing in the world could no one was getting a job. and in two weeks, one of the problems was that the grantees were only reporting people as employed if they had a new employer. but a large chunk, almost half the people coming into the program had an employer before they started the program. so those people were being reported unemployed when there were going back to their employer. that makes it impossible to judge. we also figured out that we were being asked to report quarterly, but they were not being cleared over whether the person had actually finished the program. so there may have finished one aspect of the program but still be in training. we could not tell who was finished with the program and should be looking for a job and who was not. moreover, we could not tell -- since we couldn't tell if they completed the program, we could not tell when they completed it.
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was it three months since they completed the training? and have not found a job? more had been two days and it so happens that they completed the program right at the end of the quarter when they had to report the data? as a result, you have people who want to continue funding training for green jobs, doing everything they can to protect it. and you have people who want to kill it, who are trying to use whatever information they can to kill it. i am just wondering if this thing doing anything or not. and i could not. >> i agree with all that, particularly in terms of the performance standards and making sure they provide the right incentives. i also want to touch more generally on the issue about communication and credibility regarding how research translates into policy. this is something we have seen change really over the department of education, where
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the department of education generated a lot of research, but it was not known about. half the school districts in the state's did not understand how that research could relate to their day-to-day experience. that was a major aspect of the clearing house, providing a venue to contaminate -- to communicate. it was not only about communication. it was also back credibility. one of the key aspects was stuff like standards to the education research that is conducted in a way that just described. they might have an area study where they find 200 studies hand they find that three of them past their standards. that is good because a local school district had to deal with a couple of hundred stays and did not understand research standards. there would probably give up their hands and give up.
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it is good to have that filter that helps develop creativity. i am glad to see the department of labour is headed in the same direction by piloting the similar type of conduct. we have to be realistic about some of the constraints we face. i talked about the ita experiment, the alternative diversity traditional approach which was rejected by the operators. being realistic, we have to realize we're dealing with human nature. administrators want to be helpful to people who come into their office. moving in a structured choice direction likely if they don't have more funding will likely mean that they will concentrate the funding more among the smaller number of participants. they may now want to do that
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because it means earlier in the year they will have to tell people who walk in the door that they don't have any funding to support them. we need to be cognizant of that and think about how we friend the psychology in order to change the kind of response to it. we know the challenges there. we have to think about other approaches to that. one note with respect to consolidation -- i am all about coordination and consolidation. as we have seen from the numbers, there is a lot of consolidation to be done here in this world. but is not necessarily synonymous with the their simplicity your success. we are dealing with a lot of difference of populations who
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have different needs and need different services. . if you send the money to the bloc states, my fear is that they will recreate, 53 persons of that here we have to worry about that. an aspect i is thinking about was the conflict between consolidation and customs agents. customization is very important in fashioning services that are affected by different populations. if you're going to consolidate, where? we know how consolidate -- we know how to consolidate this all in wea. there is a lot of tears come but they constrained by challenging the dollars that are able to participate. find any training you want, but we will only give you some dollars.
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even though there is a lyrical -- theoretically true, there is a constraint on juries. even if we consolidate, we still have to find a way to customize services in a way that matches the effective services to different populations. >> one thing that i would like to emphasize is the psychology of the administrators. is a real barrier to put people through a lottery. you hear that a lot, that it seems like it is unfair. but there is another thing besides the psychology, which is their technology. that is a real barrier for them to make changes because they are often dealing with very old technology where they see administrative costs of making changes that are just enormous because they are dealing with some 1980 computer. bill bel >>
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one of the benefits of consolidation allows you to be more flexible and address changes in the labor market that you might want to take event the judge. and it allows you to restructure the program in a way toward the things that seem to work. there are constant benefits to everything we do and we have to think about this carefully. i would argue that right now i think there are too many sticklers in the room. add consolidation helps focus amongst the few and allows more or somewhat more addictive vacation over who's responsible for providing services in a clear fashion. ultimately, they are the ones stories attempt to get it right. right now, is designed in new with the three responsibilities diffused through so many individuals that normally takes
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ownership and nobody has a great deal of responsibility when things are not working. comments, please wait for the microphone to arrive. >> going back on what professor trotsky was saying, weather is equilibrium or the macroeconomics, those of the backs of the program. you comment that, if there was not enough research, i would like to know. if anyone was familiar with any research. first of all, if there is an overall macroeconomic effect the program, are other companies that constrained from expanding? is it a question of international competition? what would the rationale behind
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changes to their total employment that or total gdp? >> let me qualify what i meant by general equilibrium attacks. if you turn this were granted, and get a job, they simply are where another worker would have gone that job anyway and that workers is unemployed. so you have taken a trained worker and substituting a 400 workers and you have not had an overall impact on the market. when i said general equilibrium, that is what i had in mind. i would do a lot -- i will let the others address. >> i am always of two minds on this. one mind that understands the logic of worker displacement that could occur by being crowded out by people who jump further up in the queue. and so, as a researcher, i and a
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stand that -- i see it in the journal articles. then i think about it as a ceo. when i read a journal article, there is usually a fixed number of vacancies. do i have a fixed number of vacancies at my company? no, i don't. it is just like carey described earlier about this margin or you can imagine creating jobs depending on what is a different view. so the number of vacancies we have that our organization is pretty fluid and we would be responsive in different ways to different context. so it is important to think about, in particular how that relates to the intervention is being contemplated. if you have an intervention that is advancing skills, these crowd at or displacement effect is less likely to occur. if you have something that is just a symbol bonus, whoever
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gets the job first gets an extra check, then you have to be in the been more skeptical and think harder about the displacement of fax -- displacement effects. i tend to err on the set of thinking that there is a lot of flexibility on the margin. >> my answer is similar. i think about this as, if we have more productive workers, then we will produce more and that is good for the economy. it will boost overall gdp. but the question is why don't these workers to the string on their own? what is the role for government to participate at all? then you have to ask if there is some very -- some barrier that would prevent people from going to training programs and developing skills on their own. it might be credit constraints.
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it may be that they are making mistakes. they are not even not investing enough. some aspects of training programs is the transfer, giving to the off workers to better their lot and some of it is that we think they would under invest in their skills because of things like credit constraints or myopia. >> i agree with exactly what paul and betsy said. those are all possible explanations. i just would really like to know what is going on and i don't think we have a lot of evidence. i believe but paul says is true, but i don't think i have a lot of evidence. that is what i would like, evidence, so i can make better decisions. >> yes? >> my name is nick butterfield
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and i work for senator apartment in ohio. i want to circle back had the 2009 gao report is cited frequently. be is there room for bipartisan consensus on sort of creating more cohesive systems for consolidation or what ever you think it may be? in my experience, the house approach, the more aggressive consolidation and block-granting a sort of a nonstarter for the democratic side of the aisle. but is there consensus on that for a step moving forward for: -- for consolidation? >> you can answer that question better than i can? i don't spend a lot of time on the hill. my own interactions, i will say that my interactions have had --
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have been in the past trying to convince some republican staffers on the committee that appropriates money for job training not to use our city as a reason to kill all job- training programs because i don't think that is the approach interpretation of our results. i spent two weeks during this a double of years ago when then be found that i did not have access to the data. that was kind of frustrating. that's the was very helpful in trying to consider we should continue to give access. but she was not able to succeed. i might get them again. but after jumping through 4000 10-foot hurdles. i would hope that there is
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consensus in trying to figure at how to better run and organize these programs, i do think, again, given the problems that we see and long-term unemployment, we have two choices. we can try to provide skills for these workers who have been out of the labor market a long time. we can continue to support them on other sides approach -- other side of support programs. i don't think we do that on our own. i would think that given the large supply of workers that we see that will need something it seems like the way to think of where i am going. >> i don't think that block grants is consolidation. that is because i worry about what paul said, now we are consolidating down to 50 states. all different things. mobility is declining.
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we actually need to encourage mobility. i would rather have getting the information i need and have him be the only state in the united states that is pale. can we come together and find a way to consolidate the many federal training programs and does that consolidation involved block grants to states? i think those are two different policy issues. on the first one, you'll be able to get a lot of bipartisan consensus. i think the second one will be harder. >> hi would say that i think that the consensus can go beyond consolidation, too. i was preparing for this question in this session. i collected the senator cohen -- the center core been exam
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results. there are recommendations were there could be a consensus on how to move ahead. >> we will take the two more comments. >> i have a question about -- the distinction between block grant in consolidation, focusing on block granting, everyone will look at it. consolidation is pushed down a level. in terms of control. can you point to many examples where following block granting, following consolidation and whatever program area, where
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there is actually better data that our quality data coming of, more consistent, more high quality evaluations. my sense is that the evidence points in the other direction. there is less commitment, less interest and less ability to even identify outcome data and certainly systematize reporting it. there are some higher-quality research and data enterprise emerging. >> it is not quite the experiment you posed, but you can think of the system of education and the data that is available there. it is in a decentralized system before and after the federal government came in and funded
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the creation of these things. the data was in pretty rough shape prior to that investment and is improving now. that is a reverse experiment. know much really about various examples. i think the only thing i would place isan, it's nice giving states their own freedom -- once you leave it all of to the states, then i think it is hard to get the communication which makes it hard for us to actually pull all those evaluations together. >> i certainly would agree with betsy. that is one of the things when i suggested block grants the government role would be to
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continue to provide guidance on the appropriate way those evaluations will be done and require it as the continuing receipt of money. that is just one alternative. >> ok. thank you very much. this has been a very helpful panel. i have a question about some of the issues been doing evaluations and data, which is -- there has been a lot of discussion on the difficulties of getting stuck from the state, ui records and all of the performance issues. but my and steny -- i can be corrected -- there are also a lot of barriers within the federal government and, in fact, a lot of this could be done -- they all have due to hhs as part of the system looking over --
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the legislation that is set up, gathering the ui information garnered from how you use that interpretation. social security data can be used for evaluating all search of programs without having to deal with all the issues, the irs data. it seems that we really need the states to have better templates for the performance data and who is in programs and staff. it may be that many of the outcomes, light that line, it depends on what your earnings to be done no matter what we're doing at the federal level and researchers getting access. i want to hear some songs -- some response. >> there are certainly alternatives, data sources that
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one could imagine. getting back to jeffs commons, there is not an evaluation culture. having spent several years working at the census bureau, i can assure you of that. it seemsys that we're we are collecting this data. i think we should do some alternatives. if it is difficult oftentimes for research -- in some sense, the state's told me we can i give you this data because the of the rules -- i go back to the state and a pair lay their state laws have been changed the says there does give me -- denie the seemed to be an emphasis and focus that this is the right thing to do. more than anything else, that is
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really what needs to change. if we changed it, maybe we would start seeing alternative bases -- alternative data sources, such as our sole security data and tax information available for their data purposes. >> so there are a lot of problems of data sharing within the for the government. i think that maybe one of the issues. for years, the various agencies have been trying to push legislation forward. if you talk about needing to get better data sharing with researchers, we need to be sharing across the federal government and that will be a first step to sharing with people outside of those. i can tell you that what the department of -- i was disappointed to learn that i could not figure out things like
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how long was someone's unemployment's bell, author of the information that was collected by the ui office. and when did they exit? where were they when they stopped? how many weeks had they been receiving ui when they stop getting it? you know who gets the final check and who exhaust their benefits. but anyone who's not exhausting, you do not know that much about them. >> i think that tol's excuse was always that we cannot handle the data from the states. there are technological demonstrations. but i had never heard of any sharing between hhs and dol on an employment data. >> there is a data revolution going on in the federal agencies. it is not driven by a culture
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of the evaluation our focus on evaluation good is driven more by folks on analytics. but the problem now spreads to the private sector which is now -- that is a whole revolution going on in terms of how do you collected and used more effectively and have a more accessible in a way to drive business decisions. that is a lot of what people at facing in the federal agencies. they need to make basic decisions, based on some sample data, but because of these constraints, they can i get there. there has been a lot of construction -- consultation on what does it look like? i think will look very different .ove >>
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>> i would like to thank the speakers and all of you for coming. i would like to thank the staffers for making sure that this crown runs smoothly. thank you very much. thank you, everybody. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2012] >> next, q&a with colbert came from "the washington post." them live at 7:00 a.m. your calls and comments on "washington journal." then at 10:00 a.m., kathleen and sebelius and others outline strategies to prevent suicide. but today, the u.s. chamber of commerce held its annual labor day briefing to allow line business and economic issues of concern to the british -- to the community.
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>> this week on "q&a," pulitzer prize-winning colbert i. king discusses his career as a writer at "the washington post," as well as the latest issues of governance in the nation's capital, washington, d.c. >> colbert king -- your august 18 column had the headline "who else will fall in d.c.'s corruption tale?" it started this way -- this is no tale of fiction. what is the whodunit? >> it covers a wide spectrum. we start out with a guy named sulaimon brown who was a gadfly in the 2010 mayoral campaign. he was a candidate, a less
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well-known candidate. i moderated one of the debates. i noticed that brown was constantly going after mayor fenty. zinging him with comments, crazy comments. the audience was lapping it up. the other candidate -- vincent gray, was sitting with a look on his face. through the democratic campaign -- after the campaign, when gray defeated fenty, it turns out sulaimon brown was given a job in the new gray administration, but was fired for a number of reasons. brown and then complained and said that he had been given

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